How to use Mahout in a Windows environment?

Question

I am trying to use Mahout in an application running on Windows. I want to build clusters from a lucene index using k-means.

As soon as I have to create sequence files (creating vectors from a lucene index), I get a Hadoop-Exception, since Hadoop makes command line calls to programs unknown in a Windows environment (e.g. chmod). Running in Cygwin is not an option, since I want to be able to run the App from eclipse.

So my question is

is there a way to avoid having to create sequence files to retrieve my vectors from a lucene index?

or is there a way to create sequence files in a Windows environment?

Answer 1

The only way you can run Hadoop on a Windows environment is to install Cygwin. For more info, see this blog post:

http://hayesdavis.net/2008/06/14/running-hadoop-on-windows/

Cygwin will provide all the command-line utilities (like chmod) that Hadoop relies on. You can still run your Hadoop jobs from within Eclipse if you want.

Answer 2

Do you know the SequenceFile API? Have a look here: http://hadoop.apache.org/common/docs/current/api/org/apache/hadoop/io/SequenceFile.html You can try to write/read the data by yourself.

I think you can run Mahout from eclipse in Windowns in stand-alone mode. But you will appear several short comings and barriers. You should try how far you come.

In my opinion you shouldn't insist on running mahout from eclipse. ;-)